Duke University Press Log

With B&N Closing a Store in NYC, Will Literary Culture Change?

New York Daily News reported today that Barnes & Noble will be closing its 15-year old Broadway store due to rising rent costs. With more customers turning to online outlets for books, brick-and-mortar bookstores, especially independent ones, have been struggling to remain relevant. Now, the chain bookstores are also feeling the strain of the economy and the growing interest in digital books. B&N's Lincoln Center location has been popular for many years because of its size and regular author events. With it closing, what does this mean for customers?

In Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, Jim Collins looks at how literary culture has transformed into a social activity, with superstore bookshops fueling it. Over the last two decades, superstore bookshops have helped create a customer community. With the rise of more digital books, will this change? Will reading once again become a solitary activity? 

Collins uses B&N as one of several examples to describe how literary fiction has been transformed into best-selling, high-concept entertainment. Central to his analysis and, he argues, to contemporary literary culture, is the notion that refined tasted is now easily acquired; it is just a matter of knowing where to access it and whose advice to trust. He explains that B&N is one of several institutions that provides that and helps drive literary culture. If B&N stores like the one near Lincoln Center continue to close, will literary culture start to morph?

Celebrating Grant Farred’s Tenure at the South Atlantic Quarterly

Grant Farred, editor of the South Atlantic Quarterly, will step down this summer; he will be replaced by Michael Hardt. In the video below, Farred and Hardt discuss the journal’s past:

Over the course of his eight-year tenure, Farred has widened the journal’s theoretical and geographic scope while keeping it rooted in its long history of political engagement. (When it was founded in 1901, the journal was at the center of the Bassett Affair, a milestone for academic freedom in the United States.)

Farred describes his work on SAQ as “the most important political thing I have done in this country in the twenty-one years I’ve been here.”  With the publication of such groundbreaking issues as “Palestine America,” “Racial Americana,” and "Ambushed: A Critique of Machtpolitik,” during his tenure Farred worked to expand SAQ’s reputation as a space for timely, political thought.

SAQ Welcomes Editor Michael Hardt

In the video below Michael Hardt and Grant Farred discuss Hardt’s vision for SAQ’s future.

SAQ is pleased to welcome editor Michael Hardt.  Hardt is a professor of literature and Italian at Duke University and is the co-author of Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009) with Antonio Negri. 

Hardt will introduce a new section, "Against the Day," which will appear in each issue of the journal and will focus on contemporary political issues. Future topics include Obama at midterm and student activism in the University of California system. Hardt sees himself continuing SAQ's long tradition of cultural and political engagement: "I don't want to change SAQ too much. . . . we're still only a small portion of the larger history."

Upcoming issues for 2011 include: "Theory Now," edited by Grant Farred and Michael Hardt, "Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law," edited by Eric Cheyfitz, N. Bruce Duthu, and Shari Huhndorf, and "Digital Desire," edited by Ellis Hanson.

Edward Wright-Rios Wins Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize

Congratulations to Edward Wright-Rios, author of Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887-1934, for winning the Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize from the Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS) Section of the Southern Historical Association. LACS awards the Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize every year. Named for the distinguished scholar and mentor of many Latin Americanists, this prize is awarded to the best book published on any aspect of Latin American, Caribbean, or Borderlands or Atlantic World history during the previous year by a LACS-SHA member. Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism is an investigation into how Catholicism was lived and experienced in the Archdiocese of Oaxaca during Mexico’s turbulent late 1800s and early 1900s.

Continuing Violence in Venezuela

What is the government's stance on violence? That is the question that is being asked in Venezuela, where the body count continues to rise. As reported in a recent New York Times article, the government's reaction to a front-page photograph in the paper, El Nacional, seemed to indicate that the government is more concerned over a gory image of violence than the violence itself. According to the article, some critics believe that the Venezuelan government is worsening the problem, rather than attempting to fix it as the government claims.

If Venezuela's government were more democratic, would that help with some of the violence? That is a question taken up by the contributors of Violent Democracies in Latin America (edited by Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel M. Goldstein). The collection explores how individuals and institutions in contemporary Latin American democracies use violence to impose and contest notions of order, rights, citizenship, and justice. Is Venezuela, then, that much different from its other Latin American counterparts? Pick up a copy of Violent Democracies in Latin America and compare for yourself.

Is Travel from the US to Cuba About to Get Easier?

The New York Times reports today that the Obama administration plans to lift some restrictions on Americans' ability to travel to Cuba. Academic, religious, and cultural groups may soon be able to travel directly to Cuba to facilitate "people-to-people" cultural exchange. If you plan to take advantage of the loosened restrictions, you'll want to read The Cuba Reader before you go. It's the perfect guide to the history, culture, and politics of the island. A reviewer in the Miami Herald said, "What The Cuba Reader does extraordinarily well is to reveal the nuances and complexity of the Cuban experience. All shades of politics are here, and they infuse Cuban dance, music, film and religion." The book is edited by Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr, and Pamela Maria Smorkaloff. And look for The Havana Reader sometime in the next couple of years!

Carolee Schneemann to Receive CAA Lifetime Achievement Award

We are thrilled to learn that artist Carolee Schneemann is among those being honored by the College Art Association Women's Caucus for Art with a 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award. Schneemann is a multidisciplinary artist whose radical works in performance art, installation, film, and video are widely influential. We will be publishing Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle this October. The book is edited by Kristine Stiles and is a collection of Schneemann's correspondence over forty years.

We're also proud to acknowledge our other authors who have previously been honored with a CAA Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award: Margo Machida (2009), author of Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary; Joanna Frueh (2008), author of Clairvoyance (For Those in the Desert): Performance Pieces, 1979–2004; and Faith Ringgold (1994), author of We Flew over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold.

Kumar Reviewed in New York Times

Amitava Kumar's A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb is reviewed in today's New York Times. Dwight Garner says the book is a "perceptive and soulful . . . meditation on the global war on terror and its cultural and human repercussions." He concludes, "A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb carries in the crook of its own arm Mr. Kumar’s plaintive appeal. If we’re to bridge the perilous divide that separates us from those poor and unnamed people who resent us, we first need to see them, to look into their eyes. We need, Mr. Kumar writes, 'to acknowledge that they exist.' This angry and artful book is a first step." An excerpt from the book is also posted on Guernica this week, and Kumar's new novel, Nobody Does the Right Thing is reviewed at Sepia Mutiny. And you can listen to WNYC's Leonard Lopate interview Kumar about the War on Terror here.

Book Trailer for Randy Weston's African Rhythms

Check out this wonderful video previewing jazz great Randy Weston's forthcoming autobiography, African Rhythms. It features some of Randy's music and an interview with collaborator Willard Jenkins, a jazz journalist who proposed the book to Randy and wrote it with him. The video was produced by Bret Primack.

The Mexican Border, Then and Now

Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, border cities in Mexico, used to be places Americans could slip over to for some cheap tequila, some gambling, perhaps even a taste of illicit sex. There was always a hint of danger to the visit, the Sunday New York Times reports, quoting a 1930 article about the Mexican resort of Agua Caliente: "The spice of danger adds a zest to the pleasure of thousands who visit them from this side of the frontier." Paul Vanderwood writes about Agua Caliente in his book Satan's Playground, which chronicles the rise and fall of the glitzy casinos, cabarets, and horse racing tracks that grew up on the Mexican side of the border during Prohibition. There was plenty of crime associated with the resorts, Vanderwood writes. In particular, he describes a bank heist gone wrong and the sensational trial that followed it. But, as the Times reports, the danger in the border towns today is far more sinister. Reporter Marc Lacey writes, "The naughtiness that used to give the border its flair seems innocent now. The prostitutes, hustlers and con men who once had free rein are, like everyone else, scared out of their wits." Drug and human traffickers have taken over, and tacky and illicit business that used to cater to American tourists are all boarded up. It's dangerous to be an American in the border towns but it's especially dangerous to be a Mexican woman, argue the contributors to Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas. More than 600 women and girls have been murdered and more than 1,000 disappeared in the Mexican state of Chihuahua since 1993. The book, edited by Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cythina Bejarano, argues that the violence in Mexico goes far beyond the drug trade. It is structural violence rooted in social, political, economic, and cultural inequalities.